Most investors who reach for multifamily either go big or stay very small. We do neither. We concentrate on properties in the 10 to 20 unit range, and the reasons are structural rather than sentimental.
Institutional buyers need to put large amounts of capital to work efficiently. A fund writing eight-figure checks cannot spend the same diligence and management effort on a fifteen-unit building that it spends on a two-hundred-unit one, so it simply does not bother. That removes the most aggressive, most price-insensitive bidders from our segment.
At the other end, many smaller properties are held by individual owners who bought years ago and manage part-time. A building of this size has real operational needs, renovations, turnovers, financing, compliance, that a casual owner often is not set up to handle. When they decide to sell, they are frequently looking for a clean, certain transaction more than the last dollar.
The gap between the institutions above and the casual owners below is where pricing stays rational and a focused operator's edge compounds.
This size has a practical sweet spot. It is large enough to justify professional systems and management economics, yet small enough that a principal can personally know every unit, every lease, and every line of the budget. We are not delegating the business plan to a regional manager three levels removed from the property.
Concentration cuts both ways. With fewer units per property, a single building matters more, so a vacancy or a bad assumption is felt directly. That is precisely why our underwriting is conservative and our basis discipline is strict. We would rather own a handful of buildings we understand completely than a sprawling portfolio we understand on average.